In 2022, the proportion of China's mobile game market revenue will decline for the first time in nearly five years, and the revenue of the client market will grow against the market

Reporting by reporters Chen Yibo and Wu Kezhong, from Guangzhou

Recently, Gamma Data, a third-party data research institution, released the "2022 China Game Industry Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "Industry Report") and the "2023 China Game Industry Trend and Potential Analysis Report", and issued the "2022 Global Mobile Game Market Chinese Enterprise Competitiveness Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "Competitiveness Report") specifically for Chinese mobile game manufacturers going global.

According to the above-mentioned "Industry Report", in 2022, the actual sales revenue of China's game market will be 265.884 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 30.629 billion yuan, a decrease of 10.33%. Mainly because: affected by the complex and severe situation at home and abroad, the macroeconomy is still in the recovery stage, and users' willingness to pay and payment ability are weakened; The industry is not optimistic enough about market development expectations, lack of confidence, cautious project establishment by leading enterprises, difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises to obtain investment, and low number of new game products online; Due to the impact of the epidemic, game companies have faced many challenges and limited development, such as significantly increased operating costs, insufficient project reserves, cash flow gaps, and greatly reduced team work efficiency.

In terms of overall user scale, in 2022, the number of game users in China will be 664 million, down 0.33% year-on-year. This is the first time in nearly 10 years that the number of users has declined.

As for the reasons for the decline in user scale, it is mainly due to the impact of the epidemic and the lack of new products, which has led to the loss of users, and the scale of game users in the mainland has officially entered the era of the stock market.

From the perspective of market segmentation, China's self-developed games, as the main revenue of China's game market, will have actual sales revenue of 222.377 billion yuan in the domestic market in 2022, down 13.07% year-on-year.

The decline in revenue is mainly driven by some long-term operating head products, while the revenue of game products that have been online for a long time and are in a stable period usually declines.

According to the terminal carrier market segment where game products are launched, mobile games account for the largest proportion of the actual sales revenue of China's game industry. In 2022, the actual sales revenue of China's mobile game market will be 193.058 billion yuan, a decrease of 32.48 billion yuan compared with 2021, a year-on-year decrease of 14.40%; China's mobile game market, which has grown to 8 times in seven years, has declined for the first time since 2014. The above-mentioned "Industry Report" believes that in addition to the impact of the epidemic and the decline in user scale, the lack of new game launches is also an important reason.

In 2022, the actual sales revenue of China's mobile game market accounted for 72.61%, which fell for the first time in nearly 5 years, which was lower than 76.06% in 2021 and 74.75% in the first half of 2022.

From the perspective of the user scale of China's mobile game market in 2022, in 2022, the number of mobile game users in China will reach about 654 million, down 0.23% year-on-year, and the growth of user scale in the mobile game market has stagnated.

From the perspective of China's self-developed mobile games going overseas, according to the above-mentioned "Competitiveness Report", the actual overseas sales revenue of China's self-developed games in 2022 will be 17.346 billion US dollars, down 3.7% year-on-year.

From the perspective of overseas revenue distribution, the US market is still the main source of income, and more than 30% of the overseas revenue of mainland self-developed mobile games comes from the US market.

From the perspective of the proportion of turnover TOP100 game revenue, South Korea has a higher concentration than Japan in other overseas markets, of which South Korea's TOP10 game revenue accounts for more than 50% of the total revenue of TOP100 products.

In 2022, in the mobile game head market of Indonesia and Vietnam, China's R&D products accounted for about 50%, and Chinese products have become an important part of the mobile game market in these two countries.

The above-mentioned "Competitiveness Report" also mentioned that unlike Southeast Asia, China's self-developed mobile game products are not outstanding in the Brazilian mobile game head market, but Chinese game companies have achieved outstanding results under the subdivision track. Among the 12 SLG products that entered the Brazilian Top 100 list in 2022, 11 were developed by Chinese game companies.

It should be noted that the "Competitiveness Report" also mentioned that from the perspective of the types of streaming TOP20 products in the United States, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and Germany markets for China's self-developed mobile games in 2022, the number of SLG products listed in the TOP20 in 2022 has increased to 9. Except for "DiabloImmortal", which will be launched in 2022 and "ThreeKingdomsTactics", which will be launched in 2021, all of them have been launched for more than two years, and there has been a gap in product updates.

Under the influence of the epidemic, the marketing activities of Chinese game companies in overseas markets have been greatly affected. In addition, after years of development, SLG tracks in important overseas markets are also transforming from blue ocean to red ocean.

In addition to the mobile gaming market, another gaming segment worth paying attention to is the client-side gaming market.

According to the data of the aforementioned "Industry Report", under the overall slump in the industry and the decline in actual sales revenue in the mobile market, the Chinese client market has achieved contrarian growth in the past three years. In 2022, the actual sales revenue of China's client game market will be 61.373 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4.38%.

This may be related to these factors: in the absence of explosive new products, the playing habits, payment habits and payment rate of core user players of client games are relatively stable; While the epidemic at home has brought more time to play games in front of the computer, the client game market is more risk-resistant than the mobile game market.

However, the "Industry Report" also pointed out that due to the analysis from a longer period of time, since 2014, the revenue of the client game market has been fluctuating around 60 billion yuan, reaching nearly 5 billion yuan at its peak. Therefore, the future growth space of the client game market needs to be expanded by providing more powerful excellent products and more exciting user experience.

(Editor: Dong Shuguang Proofreader: Yan Yuxia)